This is the story of the Charlottetown family as seen through the eyes of the oldest boy, Fred “Fiddler” MacDonald. This memoir tells of Frederick James’ journeys in the City, starting with his days as a newspaper and a shoe-shine boy while attending Queen Square School, an all-boys Catholic school in the centre of the City. The story retraces his paper route in the mid-1950’s and the people that he encountered in his travels.

Fred MacDonald was born and raised in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. An athlete throughout his life, he was selected to the Canadian national junior baseball team in 1965. In addition to being a schoolteacher, Fred wrote a Saturday feature covering Island sports for the Charlottetown Guardian, for almost fifty years, and was a popular TV broadcaster with CBC Charlottetown, for nearly a decade. His first literary work recounts 100 years of Maritime harness racing and was published by the Charlottetown Guardian in 2001. A Tale of Two Fiddlers was released in 2021 by Acorn Press Canada. Fred won the PEI Heritage Award in 2001 and the Charlottetown Heritage Award in 2021. He and his wife Gail co-author Atlantic Post Calls, a journal that covers harness racing in Atlantic Canada, Quebec and Ontario. They live in Kingston, Prince Edward Island.

Fred MacDonald's profile page